


how to fall out of love

by rybari



Category: Namesake (comic)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/809126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rybari/pseuds/rybari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He forgets what Ozma sounds like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how to fall out of love

_“Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;_  
 _Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,_  
 _Drows’d with the fume of poppies…”_

He thinks of her when he opens books, when he pages through dusty theorems and pricks himself on astrolabes. A picture, a phrase, a song-they speak delicately of Ozma, of her gentle fingers like cool silk, her way of quickening life with a slow and beatific smile. He used to burn up as a kid, and from the beginning what he remembers coming to help his fevers was a drowsy smell like dull scarlet, a light voice.

When Ozma was around, sprinkling calm like the sweet lavender Grandmother used to place with the clothes as they dried, Adora used to visit; Grandfather was lively and Grandmother kind; and his arm did not hurt.  His heart did not hurt. His breath did not warp with thick blood. 

He pledges his heart to the past. As he paints black muck all he can think is _I’m not a kid anymore_ , and he wonders of Ozma. It was years since he had seen her. Was he taller, finally? He remembered her in the imperfect way children remember adults-she was Taller, and so was Adora and Grandfather, but he remembers not whether she was petite or regal. Pictures inform him, but when he stands, thumb frozen for the smallest second above his heart, he constructs an Ozma in his head-it is hazy but beautiful because kindness shines through, like light through a stained glass window, and that hardens his resolve.

But his heart wants to cling to him more than he realized, and it hurt-hurt- _hurt_ and he gasped, as it emerged, dripping. It hovered before him, bigger than he thought it would be, still pumping vainly-and winked out of existence. For a moment there is brilliant and striking coolness that spreads radially from where his heart _was,_ but-then-nothing. He can feel nothing.

He puts his hand to his forehead.

He is running a fever.

\--

He follows where Ozma was.

Once he felt a salving coolness by a mountain, that got better as he climbed and he felt his heart beat twice in anticipation as he reached the peak, but then the feeling vanished and he stood, fighting frustration and despair as the setting sun dyed the sky the color of the poppies in her hair.

For a long time, that is all he does. He travels in the desert, in quagmire, through cornrows and forests and fields. He runs through people’s houses. He steals, cheats, lies and destroys because where before he felt hesitation and guilt, only echoes remained.

(When he burns the Forest, he does it because he was getting back at Renge, but he also felt the most guilt and horror than he had in years. Ozma had been closer that day, and he felt nearly human again.)

But he spent more and more time in the castle, poring over a map of Oz, as years passed and his reputation soured.

\--

He is joined by Chiseri after he steals a magic caldron. (To be absolutely fair, the person he’d stolen it from was blissfully unaware it was magic. It still had a faint suggestion of onion soup.)

While Chiseri was transparently, unquestionably his father, he pretended that his gumdrop companion came from Who Knows Where. His father acts as a makeshift conscience, which is laughable. ~~~~

“What’s that?”

A small tower of books draped in black. Years’ worth of remembrance: the one time his mother loved them, and so much so that her heart shattered.He fingers the green brooch at his throat.

“It’s a warlock thing, Chiseri. Not that _you’d_ understand.”

There’s a sigh. Warrick carefully arranges the tablecloth so that it looks more like a tombstone. A pause.

“What’s so important about it?”

He glares at Chiseri, who’s half an inch and a second away from touching the bookpile. “I said _nothing._ ”

Because Chiseri has only been around for a month and he doesn’t know Warrick, not really, he lands on the stack. “Is it for someone?”

“ _No!”_ Warrick grabs him by a wing and flings him across the room. He storms off. Then, as he’s busy cursing and overturning tables, he remembers. _You have so much of your father in you._

His hands freeze in the act of picking up a chair he doesn’t even remember touching. He replaces it carefully and sits, dropping his face in his hands.

Still a fever.

\--

He watches Renge’s rise to power with open contempt, and he follows her career with the same attention he saves for scraping droppings from his shoe if he steps in it.  What he rejects (Chiseri says) is not so much Renge as an absence of Ozma. What he really rejects (after a pen mysteriously sails past Chiseri’s face) is just Renge, period.

(He might also be holding a grudge.)

(Menders make better Wizards than anything Renge’s got going for her.)

(Which isn’t much.)

He forgets what Ozma sounds like.

\--

Warrick is distracted by Renge’s constant attempts to irritate him, and Jinjur. Jinjur alone was a handful, but Jinjur with a full complement of her soldiers was a headache and a half. They took over the courtyard and the entire first floor. He stymied their conquest of the second and third by rigging the staircases and saying _very loudly_ that his rooms were just _full_ of _really dangerous magical stuff that didn’t like pushy old women at all so stuff it Jinjur._

As it was, the only way to shut them up was to drop dinner pails on their tents. Warrick only ever thought twice about kicking them out of his courtyard when Jinjur would talk about The Old Times, and the First Dorothy, and of Ozma, young. Maybe she notices his long green nose poking out as he tried to listen in, because as time wore on they would regale each other with stories of Adora before her heartbreak and of Uncle, before he went missing.

Warrick sometimes goes weeks without Ozma’s ghost leaning over his shoulder or memories of bird wings.

\--

When the new Dorothy appears, she is different from anyone he’s ever known. Her name is Emma and she has a sharp tongue and burns poppies and she takes his reputation, his selfishness, his caustic sarcasm and hurls it back at him, where he can see guilt crashing sharp-cornered against what he has _done_ and the entire mess corroded by disappointment and failure. Emma doesn’t know the Wicked Warlock, and she doesn’t know Warrick the kid, or Warrick the failure.

She knows a guy in a black coat who has a problem with water and acts like a brat.

And: she disassembles him with the ease and grace that is born of unconscious kindness.

He talks about Ozma, yes, and he thinks about Ozma frequently, and draws lines on maps and hitches rides and learns how to fly in a slightly mildew-y feather coat so that he can find wisps of his childhood and make everything over again in the way he (imperfectly) remembers, when he was four foot nothing and growing.

But: Times change, hearts change, and Emma-not-Dorothy changes. Rapidly. She sheds names and memories faster than he can blink, moves quicker than she ought to in heels, and comes up with plans that hold together with spit and luck.

He feels more awake holding Emma’s hand while a gigantic monster bears down on them than he ever will staring down at Ozma in her perfect slumber.

Ozma is lovelier in person than in photographs or spoken word, but she is not his to love, and was never his to lose. There was the most curious sense of freedom when he sat, alone, resting his hand on hers to check that she was unharmed. He didn’t feel that sensation of his stomach flipping over when he moved her hair to check that the vines had not hurt her around the neck or skull.

“I don’t love you.” he says quietly to the sleeping princess.

She smiles.


End file.
